Guilty Minds (20 page)

I
took my toolbox and strode through the maze of hallways to the strong room. Merlin was holding the door open, and for an instant I was jolted by his strange appearance until I remembered we were both wearing masks. He said, “I knew it was just a matter of time. Can I take off this damn mask yet?”

“Not in here,” I said.

“I know. You’re right.”

Merlin let the door close, with a pneumatic sucking sound, like opening a can of tennis balls, then a thunk like a car door closing. There was nothing else in this vault but a long row of black metal file cabinets. Then I noticed another keypad mounted to the wall next to the doorjamb. I noticed it because it had begun to beep, a slow, ominous, high-pitched electronic beep.

“What’s that?” Merlin said.

“Oh, shit.”

I had a good idea what this was, though I’d never seen one before. Everyone entering the vault had to reconfirm credentials by punching in a verification code.

Or else what?

I wasn’t sure.

“It might be the same as the code that opened the door,” I said. “Do you remember what it was?”

Merlin unfolded his list of numbers. “Yes. Two nine three five.”

I spun around and pressed the four numbers. But the beeping continued, a red diode flashing.

“That’s not it,” I said. “Shit.”

“What’s this, a secondary alarm?”

“Of some sort, yeah. Auto-activated at night, probably.” I tried the standard defaults, 1111 and 9999 and 1234, but nothing halted the beeping.

Behind the mask, sweat trickled down my face. It was hot, and damp, and uncomfortable.

“You want to try?” I said.

“Sure, but I’ll just be guessing, too.”

“Meanwhile I’ll go through the files.”

I stepped aside and made room for Merlin. He began punching digits in no discernible order, faster and faster.

The beeping continued implacably.

I scrutinized the line of file cabinets. There were twelve of them, four drawers in each, and they were arranged alphabetically. The first drawer was labeled “A—Am.” I wasn’t sure where exactly I should be looking. “S” for Slander Sheet? For the Slade Group? I moved down the row of cabinets, found the drawer labeled “Sh-Sy,” pulled it open.

The files were marked with plastic tabs, names like Schuster Institute and Symons
,
Kendrick.

And there it was: Slade Group. I pulled out the brown folder, my chest tight. I opened it and found correspondence between Ashton
Norcross and a woman named Ellen Wiley, of Upperville, Virginia. Ellen Wiley, whose name sounded vaguely familiar.

The beeping stopped abruptly.

“You get it?” I said, turning around.

Merlin shrugged, said, “No. It just suddenly—”

A metal
ka-chunk
sound.

“What the hell?” Merlin cried.

“Sounds like a relocking system. Spring-loaded locking bolts. Open the door—
now
.”

He went right away to the door and turned the lever. But the door wouldn’t open.

“What the hell?” Merlin said.

“I was afraid of that.” The relocking system, I knew, was designed to block the door from opening. The sort of feature you might find in some safe rooms or survivalist shelters. In fact, I was pretty sure the strong room was actually a prefab, standalone safe room.

“We’re locked in,” he said.

I nodded.

“There’s always an internal vault door release.”

“Depends on how it’s designed. Not necessarily.”

He tried the door lever once again. “Shit. Well, screw this.” He slammed a fist against the steel door, which did nothing but hurt his fist. He groaned and turned away. I moved in and examined the doorframe, noticed the silicon gasket. I took out a pocketknife, flicked the blade, and ran it along the gap between door and frame. It was tight. Every foot or so the blade hit something solid, which I assumed were the relocking bolts. I didn’t see a way out.

Then I smelled smoke.

I sniffed, looked around, saw Merlin lighting a piece of paper, which
he’d apparently grabbed from a file drawer. The paper went up in flames, sending up a plume of smoke.

“What the hell are you doing—?” I shouted as a loud klaxon began to sound.

“Check it out.” He pointed with his free hand at the ceiling, at what looked like a smoke detector. Arrayed around the ceiling, every eight feet or so, were sprinkler heads, only they were hissing gas, not sprinkling water.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“That’s going to automatically trigger the unlocking mechanism on the door,” Merlin said with a crooked smile.

The sheet of paper floated away in a black wisp and danced through the air, the smoke now thick enough to sting my eyes.

“You goddamned idiot!” I said. “That’s halon gas!” A label on the wall to the left of the door warned:

CAUTION

THIS AREA IS PROTECTED BY A HALON 1301 FIRE SUPPRESSION SYSTEM. WHEN ALARM SOUNDS OR UPON GAS DISCHARGE, EVACUATE HAZARD AREA IMMEDIATELY.

“They don’t use halon anymore!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes they do.” Some years ago it was determined that halon damaged the ozone layer, and it was banned. But existing systems were allowed to remain in place. They were grandfathered in. It was still considered a superior alternative to water-sprinkler systems, especially in archives and places where water could damage paper records. Nothing as effective had taken its place.

Halon was not only bad for the environment, it was bad for humans.
At high concentrations—in other words, in a few minutes, when enough halon had hissed out of the ceiling-mounted nozzles—it could cause permanent nerve damage and then death.

And we were trapped in here.

The fire suppression system didn’t unlock the doors. The relocking mechanism on the doors had been triggered by our failure to disarm the secondary security system.

Merlin was coughing, and then I began to cough as well. I was furious at him for setting off the halon system, for doing something so impulsive without even checking with me. But even more, I was beginning to feel icy tendrils of panic seep into my bowels.

Because I did not see a way out.

D
espite the deafening clang of the alarm, despite the hissing of the halon gas, despite my growing sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped in this steel-reinforced coffin, I forced myself to focus. To think.

It wasn’t easy. I was steadily growing more and more woozy from breathing the halon, and I couldn’t stop coughing. My body was desperately craving oxygen.

What Merlin had done wasn’t, in fact, stupid. Setting off the fire alarm
should
have triggered the automatic unlocking of the vault doors. That’s how it should have been, and probably what the fire code required.

But this setup privileged security over safety. Our failure to enter the right code in the secondary panel meant we were locked in, whether that was against the fire code or not.

When I was a teenager living in the town of Malden, north of Boston, my friends and I used to hang out at the body shop of Norman Lang Motors, a used-car dealership owned by one of my buddies’ fathers. There I learned, from a repo man, how to pick locks. I also learned the rudiments of electrical wiring, the stuff engineers learn in school. And I
knew that the secondary alarm panel had to be connected to some kind of relay switch that triggered the relocking bolts. It didn’t take me long to find what had to be the relay. It was a white-painted metal box about four inches square, mounted to the wall next to the door. Unobtrusive. Easy to miss. These relays always have an electromagnet inside, and the magnet either closes a switch or opens it. And that, right or wrong, was about the sum total of what I knew about relay switches.

Connected to the relay was white-painted electrical conduit about half an inch wide, which ran along the doorframe, then straight up to the ceiling. That had to be the power supply.

I handed Merlin the brown folder so I had both hands free. “Let me have your magnet,” I said.

Merlin, no surprise, seemed to get why I wanted it. I’m sure he knew a hell of a lot more about mechanical engineering than I did. “You think—?”

He handed me the oblong chunk of rare-earth magnet. Neodymium, he’d said. It was extremely strong, but was it strong enough? I took it and knelt down. I pulled open the metal box and saw, as I suspected, a copper coil inside. The guts of the electromagnet. Then I placed the neodymium magnet on the exterior of the box and waited.

And nothing happened.

My chest had grown tight, and I was short of breath and light-headed, and my heartbeat had begun to speed up, not from adrenaline either.

“Nice try,” Merlin said. “But the fire department should be here soon.”

What I did next was out of desperation. I took out the Glock I’d stolen from Curtis Schmidt’s house. I stood up, gripped the gun two-handed, and cocked it. My head was swimming.

“Heller, you’re not serious.”

“Stand back,” I said.

I fired a round into the wiring conduit on the doorframe.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the bolts
ka-chunked
open. I grabbed the door lever and pulled it open. We both dove forward, out of the halon, and gulped air. I stumbled a bit, unsteady on my feet. I could hear sirens in the distance, which meant they must have been close to the building.

Merlin pointed toward a door marked
STAIRS
. We ripped off our masks so we could breathe better.

And we ran.

I
screwed up, Nick,” Merlin said.

“It was a good idea,” I said. “It didn’t work. That’s not screwing up.”

“No, I don’t mean lighting the paper on fire. I thought that was pretty clever. I mean, I left the folder behind.”

“Oh.” I paused. “You did, huh? Yeah, that’s a screw-up, all right.” I felt a surge of hot anger but did my best to conceal it. Merlin looked so dispirited that I added right away, “But not a tragedy. We got the name and her location. We have Ellen Wiley and Upperville, Virginia. I remember that much.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

We walked down a dark, wide street, moving from pool to pool of yellowish light cast by the sodium-vapor street lamps. Traffic was light, but not nonexistent. It was a little after four in the morning. Dawn was still a few hours off.

—

Merlin’s mistake had put added pressure on us—“us” being me, Dorothy, and now Mandy Seeger, since I thought of Mandy as being part of
our team. Not only had we set off the fire alarm and damaged the strong room door, but at some point soon, someone in the firm would find the misplaced Slade Group file folder, and that would start a clock ticking. The fact that the file had been isolated and removed from the secured file cabinets would tell them it was probably important. That would point a blinking neon arrow at Ellen Wiley’s name. Maybe they’d alert her that someone might be coming for her.

Because someone was.

I allowed myself five hours of sleep. That was about the minimum I could operate on with my cognition fairly intact. At ten in the morning, Dorothy, Mandy, and I gathered in the living room of my hotel suite. I’d given her the name of Slander Sheet’s owner, Ellen Wiley, and she’d made a call to an old friend at
The
Washington Post
.

“So it’s Ellen Wiley, huh?” she said. “Amazing.” She was reclining in one of the big lounge chairs, one leg tucked under the other. She was wearing black leggings and a white button-down shirt. She wore her wavy hair up. I couldn’t decide if she was a redhead or a brunette with coppery highlights.

“The shadowy owner herself,” I said. “What do I need to know about her?”

Mandy was looking over a sheaf of paper. “My friend at the
Post
pulled a file on Wiley and e-mailed it to me. She’s an interesting case, Ellen Wiley. Extremely rich—a tobacco heiress. She inherited a big chunk of the Philip Morris tobacco fortune. She’s got homes in Upperville, Anguilla, Scottsdale, and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. I’m pretty sure Upperville is her chief residence. A huge estate on two thousand acres in horse and hunt country. She’s a big patron of the arts. Gives a lot to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville. Divorced three times, each time
married to a younger man. She’s not a recluse, exactly, but she’s extremely publicity-averse. She stays away from the press.”

“So why does she own Slander Sheet?” Dorothy asked.

Mandy riffled through the file. “That’s a mystery.”

“I need to see her up close. I want to ask her some questions. I’m fairly good at sussing out liars.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“So where is she now? How do we find out?”

Mandy smiled.

“At her estate in Upperville.”

“You’re sure?”

“She’s hosting a fund-raiser tonight for wounded veterans at her house.”

“So tonight’s out. We go to see her tomorrow.”

“I say we go tonight. You’re a veteran, aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t wounded. Who’s ‘we’?”

She smiled again. “You need a date.”

“I wasn’t invited.”

“What’s ‘invited’?”

“I like your style,” I said.

T
he drive to Upperville took a little more than an hour, straight down 66 west and then up north to Route 50.

I wore a suit—I had nothing fancier with me, of course, than the suit I’d worn on the way down from Boston—and Mandy wore a white zip-front peplum jacket over a matching skirt. She also looked like she’d spent some time putting on her makeup. She looked terrific, sophisticated and attractive.

I drove, and we fell into easy, companionable conversation. We talked for a while about her time working for
The
Washington Post
, and about my time in Iraq and Bosnia. She seemed to enjoy bumping up against the barrier of what I couldn’t talk about. I could see what a relentless reporter she must be. She told me about all the research she’d done on Justice Claflin when she was writing the piece about Kayla, and I asked if she wouldn’t mind sharing her other files with me.

“Sure. There’s all kinds of goodies in my files.”

“Anything on me?”

“You flatter yourself. Slander Sheet was only interested in the
powerful and the famous. The more lascivious, the better. Gideon’s in there.”

“Gideon?”

“Rumored to be something of a dog.”

“He’s seventy-five.”

“Makes no difference. Did you know his sister was raped?”

I shook my head.

“Years ago. Helped shape the man he turned out to be.”

“How so?”

“Apparently the rapist was a white guy. And they never caught him.”

“Maybe there wasn’t enough evidence. Or maybe they couldn’t be bothered.”

“Maybe. And the wife of the White House chief of staff has a shoplifting problem, apparently. And the number-two at the CIA may have plagiarized his Woodrow Wilson School master’s thesis.”

“Do you care about all this stuff? I mean, the gossip?”

“Not especially.”

“Me neither. Did you ever care? Before you got fired?”

In a small voice she said, “It paid the mortgage.”

I let the subject drop.

When we passed Manassas, she said, “So what’s the game plan? Are you just going to ask her if she ordered the murder of Kayla Pitts?”

“You know the game: You go in at a slant. Get her to talk. Suss her out. Get a sense of how much she knows.”

“And when she lies?”

“I get lied to all the time. It’s my business.”

“That must get depressing.”

“Not really. You can learn a lot from a lie. Sometimes more than from the truth. If she lies to us, we’ll learn something, too.”

“But you don’t think she ordered Kayla to be killed, do you?”

“I think she set this train in motion. I think her plan was to use this digital rag Slander Sheet to destroy Jeremiah Claflin, for some reason. She was doing a full-on Hearst—creating the news and then breaking it.”

“You think?”

“Worked with the Spanish-American War, right?” She knew what I was talking about, how at the end of the nineteenth century a couple of newspaper moguls, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, had their correspondents invent sensational, fictional stories about atrocities in Cuba, which eventually provoked the United States into going to war with Spain. Because Hearst and Pulitzer had their own war going on—over circulation. They did it to sell newspapers.

“Okay,” she said, “but killing Kayla . . . ?”

“My gut says Ellen Wiley ordered up a scandal. Not a homicide. I think the thugs she hired just took things one lethal step further—killing the girl so she couldn’t compromise them. At the end of the day, everyone saves his own ass first. Law of human nature.”

“You think she knows her people did it?”

I nodded. “And maybe, just maybe, she’ll feel a pang of guilt and come clean. Or at least open the door a crack. But I need to see her face-to-face so I know what she knows.”

There was a long pause, and then she said, “Thanks for including me.”

“In what?”

She waved a hand. “In all this. I need to put things right. As much as I can.”

“I understand.” I felt roughly the same way.

It wasn’t until we’d been on Route 50 for a while and passed a sign for the Upperville Baptist Church that we realized we’d arrived.

“But where’s the town?” Mandy said.

“Good question.”

Upperville wasn’t even a town; it was an unincorporated community, an assortment of old stone and brick buildings, most of them lined up along Route 50. There was a sandstone Episcopal church, a post office, a fire department. An inn once owned by George Washington, or so the Internet had told us. And horse farms. A lot of horse farms. A sign announced that this was the site of the annual Upperville Colt and Horse Show.

We stopped at a general store, and Mandy ran in to ask directions. Past the cemetery and then continue on for a couple of miles, she was told. On either side of the road were horse fences. There was a break in the fence and an unmarked road. We turned left there, as instructed. Soon we came to a stone fence. Inset in one of the pillars at the opening was a granite block inscribed
ELM SPRING FARMS
. Entering ahead of us were a Bentley and a Range Rover. We were obviously in the right place.

The road went on for a long while, jigging to the left and then to the right and then straight, lined with gracefully pruned elm trees and pin oaks. Just beyond the trees, on the right, was a clearing. In the gaps between the trees I could glimpse a long straight lane of asphalt paving, which I soon realized was an airstrip. It seemed to be about a mile long. The road continued another half mile or so. Finally it broadened out and the trees ended. Parked on either side of the wider road were a lot of cars.

Expensive cars, too. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs and Range Rovers, Bentleys and Jaguars and Lamborghinis and Ferraris. And then there were the retro vehicles, the woody-sided station wagons, and the pickup trucks that probably belonged to the real hands-on horse-farm owners who had so much money they didn’t need to impress you. A young guy in a valet uniform was guiding the cars into their slots.

We’d timed this well, in the middle of the arrival rush. We parked the Suburban and joined the parade of party guests walking down the
driveway toward the extremely large redbrick Georgian house. I knew it was at least ten thousand square feet, on a two-thousand-acre plot of land that also included a private airstrip and stables and paddocks.

But when we got to the front door, there was a problem. A couple of pretty blond young women were sitting at a table just inside, handing out name badges and checking names off a list.

We were not on any list, of course.

“James and Lisa Grant,” I said pleasantly.

Mandy glanced at me quickly. We hadn’t discussed whether we’d pretend to be a married couple; I’d just improvised it, last minute, forgetting that neither of us wore wedding bands.

“Grant,” one of the girls murmured, running her finger down a column. “Um, how do you spell that?”

“Like it sounds.” Behind them was a painting of a white barn that I was pretty sure was by Georgia O’Keeffe.

“Um, I don’t see a Grant here.” She turned to the blonde sitting next to her. “Do you have James Grant?” They probably each had half the alphabet. The second blonde scanned her list, running an index finger down her list. She shook her head.

Then Mandy stepped forward. “I’ll just write out our name badges if you give me a couple of blanks.” As if the real problem was that we didn’t have any badges. Not that we weren’t on the list of invited guests.

The two blondes looked at each other, and the first one shrugged. You could see the conflicting instincts battling it out in their heads—
Only admit guests on the list!
versus
Never insult the guests!

Never insult the guests
won out, as I knew it would. How did they know the Grants’ names hadn’t been accidentally left off?

“Sure,” the first blonde said uncertainly, pulling out blank name badges from a box and handing them to Mandy.

The entry hall, tiled in terra-cotta, gave way to a great hall with
twenty-foot ceilings, very grand and formal. The floor was black-and-white harlequin tiles, the walls were painted oxblood, there were dramatic swags of drapery and gilt-framed equestrian paintings. The room was crowded. It looked like there were sixty or seventy people. We each took hors d’oeuvres from a waitress and flutes of champagne from a waiter and entered the fray.

It didn’t take long at all to identify Ellen Wiley. She was a tall, attractive woman in her seventies who looked easily twenty years younger. She had the figure of a woman who did a lot of Pilates. She was wearing a long-sleeved gold evening dress with a diamond choker. Her hair, light brown with blond highlights, was styled in a short, flattering shag. She was talking to a silver-haired man who looked ex-military, and she was laughing, a deep swooping laugh.

“Now what?” Mandy said.

“We drink, we talk, we suffer through the inevitable pitch for money, and then we wait until we can get her alone.”

Mandy and I talked for a long while, keeping to ourselves, like you weren’t supposed to do at a party like this. Someone clinked a glass, then others clinked in response, and the room quieted. Ellen Wiley—we’d identified her correctly—made a speech about how for every US soldier killed in war, seven are wounded. She talked about the invisible wounds of war, like post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and major depression. She introduced one grievously wounded soldier, recently back from Iraq, and he spoke a few words and reduced a few people to tears.

She finished speaking, and a few minutes later I saw her approach us. Her hand was extended. “You’re the Grants, I’m told,” she said, a smile lighting up her face. Her eyes were a bright blue.

“James Grant,” I said and shook her hand. She’d been briefed. James Grant was a major donor to conservative causes.

“Lisa Grant,” Mandy said and did the same.

Up close you could see the skillful plastic surgery she’d had, particularly in the tight lines around her eyes when she smiled. She turned toward me. “I understand you wanted to talk to me, Mister, uh
Grant
.” She raised her eyebrows as she said
Grant
. “Happy to do so, when the guests have gone.”

She smiled again and turned away.

—

A young guy in a blue blazer came up to us a few minutes later, introduced himself as Rico, and escorted us out of the great room and down a hallway to the library, which was only slightly smaller than the great room. It had large windows and whitewashed stone walls and built-in bookcases. The floors were painted wood. He gestured toward a round tea table with chairs around it in front of a large painting, a big red square that looked like a Rothko. “Mrs. Wiley will be with you soon,” Rico said. When we took our seats, he turned without a word and left.

As we sat, uncomfortable on the hard wooden chairs, we said nothing to each other, because of the possibility of recording devices.

We waited uneasily.

Somehow she knew we wanted to see her. We hadn’t said anything to anyone else at the party, or to the blond girls with the name tags.

I thought back to the folder that Merlin had left in the locked file room at the law firm and wondered whether someone at Norcross and McKenna had made the connection and warned Ellen Wiley. That seemed the likeliest explanation.

But if she knew we were there under false pretenses, why was she still willing to meet with us?

Mrs. Wiley appeared about an hour later. She began speaking as she entered the library, a good fifty feet from us.

“Finally!” she said. “
Now
the party gets interesting.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Oh, I know every single name on my guest list. I didn’t invite anyone I don’t know. When I’m hitting people up for money, I prefer to know them personally.” She tipped her head to one side, placed a hand on her hip, and smiled coquettishly. “The least you could have done was use your real names.”